There's been a lot of chatter (both here and other places) about an idea first surfaced by Microsoft earlier this year -- "the identity bus." To be far, my once-partner-in-crime, Phil Becker, wrote an extensive set of articles (4 parts) about an identity router around 18 months ago, and I do think that Phil was at least alluding to an early conception of the "identity bus."
Now, though, we have something concrete. That something is the beta release of a Microsoft project code-named, Zermatt. Kim Cameron puts it succinctly: "Zermatt is what you use to develop interoperable identity-aware applications that run on the Windows platform."
The hope, of course, is that eventually it works on *more* than just the Windows platform, but at this point I'll take what I can get.
Zermatt gets us one step closer to making applications identity-aware. To truly understand this, think of traditional identity management. That form doesn't do anything to make the application involved in identity, rather it takes pre-existing identity stores or silos and *abstracts* them out to a meta-level. The idea behind the identity bus (or router or gateway) is much much different. It operates on the premise that identity-aware applications generate identity claims (tokens) that are translated as necessary for interoperability with other applications.
That is a networked model. That is a scalable model. That makes corporate IT and identity resemble the the network that is the internet. And that, my friends, is a good good thing.
